We study escalation and aggression in an experimental first-strike game in which two participants play multiple rounds of a money-earning task. In each round, both players can spend money to accumulate weapons. The player with more weapons can spend money to strike against the other player,...

This study uses a three-person gift-exchange game experiment to examine the impact of pay comparisons on effort behavior. We compare effort choices made in a treatment where workers' wages are secret with effort choices made in two 'public wages' treatments. The two 'public wages' treatments...

Fungibility of money is a central assumption in the theory of consumer choice: any unit of money is substitutable for another. This implies that the composition of income or wealth is irrelevant for consumption. We find in a field experiment that even in a simple, incentivized setup many...

We investigate the impact of wage comparisons for worker productivity. We present three studies which all use three-person gift-exchange experiments. Consistent with Akerlof and Yellen's (1990) fair wage-effort hypothesis we find that disadvantageous wage discrimination leads to lower efforts...

We report evidence from public goods experiments with and without punishment which we onducted in Russia with 566 urban and rural participants of young and mature age cohorts. Russia is interesting for studying voluntary cooperation because of its long history of collectivism, and a huge...

Previous studies suggest that two otherwise robust 'anomalies' - preference reversals and disparities between buying and selling valuations - are eroded when respondents participate in repeated markets. We report an experiment which investigates whether this is true when factors neglected in...

Vendettas occur in many real world settings where rivals compete for a prize, e.g., winning an election or a competitive promotion, by engaging in retaliatory aggressive behavior. We present a benchmark experiment where two players have an initial probability of winning a prize. Retaliatory...

We introduce the "ball-catching task", a novel computerized real effort task, which combines "real" efforts with induced material cost of effort. The central feature of the ball-catching task is that it allows researchers to manipulate the cost of effort function as well as the production...

We extend the literature on competitive behaviour by investigating environments in which the choice to compete is not made by an individual themselves, but by someone else. Choosing on behalf of others is an integral part of life and gender may be an important factor in shaping the perceived...